SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Saga-Book of the Viking Society
less" is suitable also for the ncektan oc neisan of Barlaams
saga - the king has been stripped of everything and cast
away on an island to die. I thus translate neiss in
a negative way - it is used of the man who is destitute of
clothes, weapons, food, courage; and 6neiss is the man
who has these things and so is unafraid. Then he can be
a rekkr,"
This positive sense of the formally negative word
6neiss fits every other context where the word is used in
the Edda, but it needs an explanation in HH I, where
Signin abuses HQl'5brodd as 6neiss sem kattar son. It is
clear from the above, however, that it cannot be the adj.
itself which is insulting - the insult must lie in the
comparison with the cat.
The cat is not very old as a domestic animal in
Scandinavia. The first archeological evidence of the
domestic cat is from about A.D. 1000 and comes from Lund
(Skane). But the name kpttr was used for many animals
that caught mice, among them the ermine, common in
Norway and the other Scandinavian countries but not
found in Iceland. John Bernstrom believes that the
white catskin which, according to the Eiriks saga rauba,
I>orbjQrg litilvolva wore in Greenland was certainly
ermine, and that the pair of cats which in the Prose Edda
are said to draw Freyja's chariot were also thought of as
ermine. He says that this animal played a large part in
the pre-Christian world of ideas, but little research has
been done on its significance. He reminds us of the
position held by the cat in witchcraft and popular beliefs
of modern times.!"
A philological investigation concerning the cat in Old
Norse literature yields a meagre harvest. The only cat in
all the poetry is the one in HH I. The word kpttr appears
as a heiti for giant in the Pulur of the Prose Edda.t) Here
• Guilrunarkviila I II 4 has ace. sg. jpfur oneisinn, usually emended to
oneisan, The poem is certainly Icelandic. Does the manuscript form
represent a cliche that was wrongly remembered?
10 K ulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder VIII (1963), s.v. katt.
"Pulur IV b 5. Finnur J6nsson, Edda Snorra Sturlusonar (I931), 195
(v, 421).